We’re excited to announce Bread Express, our first-to-market, shorter application form designed to cut down on the pieces of information required by consumers to see credit terms. Good news: this improvement has demonstrated a potential to increase pre-qualification rates for Bread’s retail customers by 5 to 10 percent. Bread Express helps streamline the checkout experience by reducing friction and decreasing the pieces of information consumers are required to share to see their credit terms. Many traditional financing application forms require quite a few pieces of personal information, but Bread Express only requires three to pre-qualify a shopper: name, email, and mobile phone number.

Consumers no longer need to enter their social security number, date of birth, or address to see their loan terms—all more sensitive pieces of info that consumers aren’t keen to part with just to find out their rates.

We’ve been seeing firsthand how friction at checkout can impact your business. To get some hard data, Bread conducted a survey of over 500 Americans into their buying behavior. What we learned was just how detrimental an overly long or complicated checkout process is to the bottom line.

Your Shoppers’ Biggest Pain Points

Long Checkout Times – 58.5% of consumers cited a ‘long check out process’ or ‘payment information taking too long’ to enter as their main pain points for online shopping. No matter how attractive and informative your product pages are, or how intuitive your experience is, if providing payment information takes too long, your shoppers are going to abandon their cart and you’re going to lose out on a sale.

Too Many Fields – We found that a shocking 49.9% of consumers said they were ‘very likely’ to abandon a form because it asked for too much information. Too many fields to fill out, and half of your potential customers are going to give up on buying altogether.

Sharing Sensitive Information – Based on Bread’s survey, 63.2% of respondents noted they were extremely uncomfortable submitting their social security number to an online website. It’s one of the most valuable and vulnerable pieces of personal information we have, and until now it’s been mandatory to get a rate quote for a financing plan.

Bread Express express tackles all these pain points directly—our new shorter prequalification doesn’t require customers to enter any part of the Social Security number or date of birth to see their rates.

Our customers already have good things to say about this new offering:

“We’re extremely excited about offering Bread Express and continuing to remove checkout friction and improve our shopping experience online. The new application process is simple and fast and really helps reduce cart abandonment in the checkout process by making it easy for our customers to apply and learn about their purchasing power earlier on in the shopping journey.” said Yuvi Alpert, CEO of jewelry brand Noemie, one of our beta testers.

As shopping habits continue to radically change, your shoppers will expect—and demand—frictionless experiences while shopping and at checkout. Your financing solution needs to keep pace, and the better that experience is, the more sales you’re going to make. With Bread Express, you can offer flexible options anywhere during the customer journey, and with as little friction as possible. Conversion comes first.

Bread Express will be live at the end of the first quarter of 2019. Learn more about our products here.